CHAPTER 5 — WHERE NO NOISE EXISTS
Alistair's apartment was small, orderly, and stripped of unnecessary variables. There were no decorative paintings, no family photographs, no plants that required irregular attention. Only a minimalist desk, a bookshelf with volumes organized by subject and size, and a bed that looked newly purchased because it was never given enough time to become wrinkled.
He entered at 2:17 a.m., placed his coat on the designated hook beside the door, and untied his shoelaces with mechanical movements. He did not turn on the lights. Darkness did not bother him—on the contrary, it silenced visual noise.
The digital clock in the kitchen glowed 02:17 in bright red numbers.
Another night without real sleep.
Another night of continuous processing.
---
As he heated water for tea (no sugar, no milk, only the pure essence of the plant), he began mentally reviewing the case that had just been closed.
"There were three possible versions of the movement," he murmured quietly, speaking to himself as he always did in solitude. "Hartmann pushes Marcus. Marcus stumbles backward. The window frame vibrates after impact. But the frame is 1.7 meters from the point of collapse. The trajectory doesn't match. The blow must have been lower—more direct."
He spoke to no one, but never louder than necessary. His mind functioned like a perpetual gear system: if it found no external friction to resolve, it kept spinning by inertia, self-generating analytical noise.
Alistair was not afraid of the physical darkness of night.
He feared his own thoughts when they lacked an external structure to follow.
Sleeping meant shutting down a system that did not know how to disconnect voluntarily.
---
For the tenth time, he reviewed the crime scene photographs on his tablet. His gaze moved with millimetric precision, cataloging details he had already memorized but still needed to check again for absolute certainty.
"The nylon thread… it shouldn't have caught in that specific groove. The surface was too clean. Unless Hartmann pulled harder than necessary out of panic. Yes. That explains the inconsistency."
It wasn't a relevant doubt anymore. The case was closed. Leo Hartmann had confessed through tears.
But Alistair's mind kept flagging those tiny irregularities like microscopic holes demanding to be filled with coherent explanations.
It wasn't perfectionism.
It was a neurochemical obligation.
---
He walked to the seventeenth-floor window and opened it completely. The cold early-morning wind rushed in without resistance, carrying the distant smell of gasoline and industrial baking bread. That sensory contrast helped him reorganize his mental priorities.
Observe. Classify. Close. Repeat.
He drank the boiling tea without reacting to the temperature. He stared at the city from above, where individual sounds could no longer be distinguished—only a constant, uniform murmur, almost like white noise.
That was the only moment of the day when the world seemed to become relatively still for him.
---
He opened one of his black spiral notebooks. It wasn't an emotional diary. It contained no personal reflections or sentimental memories.
Only lists of raw, unprocessed data:
Pending cases with incomplete variables
Strange patterns detected without clear explanation
Objects that appeared once at a crime scene and never again in similar cases
Voice frequencies that didn't match the emotional content of speech
Micrometric inconsistencies in testimonies
That night, he added a new category:
Asymmetry (False Noise).
It had no direct relation to Leo Hartmann's case, but it served as a reminder that something, deep down, had felt slightly unsettling in the scene—an intuition without hard data to support it.
He closed the notebook. He didn't deny those intuitive sensations. He simply archived them until they became functionally useful.
---
He lay fully clothed on the bed. He counted the seconds between each heartbeat. Fifteen minutes later, without reaching sleep, he got up again.
His insomnia wasn't a diagnosable medical condition.
It was the physical manifestation of a computational mental structure with no shutdown switch.
He returned to the desk. Opened another folder—this one from an old, unresolved case, archived under "Unsolved / Insufficient Evidence." A murder from three years ago. It had never officially been assigned to him, but he had obtained access to the file anyway.
His brain needed an active puzzle to justify its constant functioning. Without external structure, it fed on itself in destructive cycles.
---
Between yellowed pages and faded photographs, a fleeting thought crossed his mind—laden with a quiet desperation he would never admit out loud:
I wish something truly difficult existed. A chaos genuinely worthy of being ordered. Something that would force me to use all my unresolved processing power in ninety minutes.
He dismissed it immediately as romantic nonsense. Complex cases were rare. Most were simple, predictable, dull.
But the thought remained there—floating unresolved in some corner of his subconscious.
---
At 4:06 a.m., Alistair was still awake. Still comparing microscopic patterns between cases with no apparent relationship. Still searching for a hidden order that probably did not exist.
The tea had gone completely cold in the cup.
The wind still entered through the open window.
And Alistair did not know that very little time remained—less than two weeks—before the universe would grant his desperate wish with brutal precision.
Very little time before someone would begin observing him from a place he did not yet know existed.
A place where order was not an archaeological discovery to be unearthed from chaos—
but a deliberate creation.
A place where someone else thought exactly like him…
but in the opposite direction.
---
Alistair closed the old case folder. Turned off the tablet. Returned to bed for the third time that night.
This time he managed to sleep for thirty-seven minutes before his mind woke him again with another unresolved inconsistency from the Hartmann case.
Outside, the city began to stir slowly. Lights flickering on in windows. Garbage trucks starting their routes.
The noise of the world rose again.
And Alistair, in his seventeenth-floor apartment, mentally prepared for another day of imposing order on a universe that stubbornly refused to stop being chaotic.
Unaware that chaos would soon have a proper name.
And intentional architecture.